Poetry, Guinness, Skepticism, carnivals, single malt Scotch, horror films, vampires, absinthe, guitar, night, cold weather, coffee, sushi, XCW Wrastlin', Scotland, fencing, obsessing...
I'd like to meet:
My friend James and I used to sip scotch and play chess some
nights, evenly matched and absorbed in the game until,
because of the certain way a shadow moved or the far-off
bark of a neighbor dog, one of us would be reminded of a
poem we'd read. Soon, our armies abandoned, we'd be sitting
there with books stacked and a bottle between us, reading
each other Rilke or Neruda until dawn. Of course there is
only one James, but there are also others like us....
Music:
Appendix Out,
Bach,
Calla,
Chopin
Dead Can Dance,
Dead Milkmen,
Depeche Mode,
Dismemberment Plan,
Drums and Tuba,
Flogging Molly,
Flying Bugar Klezmer Band,
Fuck,
Gloomadeers,
Godspeed You Black Emporer!,
Les Savy Fav,
Lot 49,
Lycia,
McNasty,
Midnight Syndicate,
Modest Mouse,
Mogwai,
Mountain Goats,
Muse,
Nirvana,
old Metallica,
Perfect Circle,
Pinebox Serenade,
Pixies,
Radiohead,
Record Hop,
Silver Mt. Zion,
Slobberbone,
Sonic Youth,
Spitfire Tumbleweeds,
Taraf de Haidouks (thanks Warren)
The Doors,
The Pogues,
Tim Prudhomme,
Tool
Movies:
Pi, Herzog's Nosferatu (1979 remake), Full Moon's Subspecies series, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Takashi Miike, The Eye, Evil Dead 2, Freaks, Cannibal the Musical, Session 9, Hammer Films, May, The Dead Hate the Living, Castle Freak, Ginger Snaps trilogy, City of Lost Children, Ratcatcher, Trainspotting, Dead Man, Il Postino, Henry Fool, Star Wars IV-VI, Braveheart, Fight Club, Clockwork Orange
Television:
I renounce renouncers of television. MonstersHD is the greatest channel ever created. Pining over the death of Deadwood and Carnivale. Battlestar Gallactica and Penn & Teller Bullshit! still keep me going, and to a lesser degree Rome. Buffy and Angel were old mainstays, as well as the X-Files for giving what is probably our pop-culture, generational motto "I want to believe." Doctor Who, both old and new. Older favorites were Kids in the Hall, Flying Circus, The Tick (cartoon). Anything on strange history or haunted places, good travel shows, etc.
Books:
Currently in the research stack: "Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus," edited by Nathaniel Knaebel; "The Long Shadows," by Jack Earle; "The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages," by Ilse E. Friesen; "Rabelais and his World" by Mikhail Bakhtin; "Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self," by Leslie Fiedler, and other random books on sideshow history and theory. Contemporary Poets: Albert Goldbarth, Bryan Dietrich, Scott Cairns, Bruce Bond, Corey Marks, Mark Cox, Stephen Dobyns, Larry Levis, Edward Hirsch, W.S. Merwin, Andrew Hudgins, Adam Zagajewski. Older ones: Rilke (who is God), Stevens (who is next to God), Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Szymborska, Miloscz, Ahkmatova, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Scottish Poets: Iain Crichton Smith, Edwin Morgan, Edwin Muir, Tom Leonard, Hugh MacDiarmid. Spent time with the Beats during my youth but have long since grown out of them. Fiction (need to up my reading here): Mainly Gothic, Magical Realism, etc.--Satanic Verses, I Am Legend, Haunting of Hill House, Poe, Borges, Marquez. Skepticism: "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How We Believe: The Search for God in the Age of Science" by Michael Shermer, "Flim-Flam" by James Randi, Skeptic Magazine. Other non-fiction: Random New Physics stuff, literary history and theory, anthropology, etc.
Heroes:
Rilke, Coleridge, Keats; also, Radu Vladislas and Gomez Addams (tv)
